Immerstill (2023)

Lisa Schiller, who grew up in the village of Immerstill, runs a cupcake shop in Vienna. After her younger sister Marie and Marie’s friend Natalie go missing, Lisa returns to her hometown to look for them. There, she reunites with her father, Valentin, who is now in a relationship with Andrea Hafner, and her aunt Hannelore. Two weeks earlier, Markus and Kathi had also disappeared from Immerstill. However, Markus’s parents had received a text message saying that he and Kathi were emigrating to New Zealand together. Lisa accuses the police officers Patrick Pollanc, her ex-boyfriend, and his father Jani of doing nothing. During a joint search involving the police, Mayor Steharnig, and several villagers, Natalie is found dead in the Drau wetlands. There is still no trace of Lisa’s sister Marie. A year earlier, Nathalie had wanted to report Markus to the police. Traude tells the police that her son Markus is just as aggressive and violent as her husband, Karl. Traude fears that her son may have hurt Kathi or Marie. From Marie’s diary, Lisa learns that Marie and Kathi had been a couple for several weeks. The autopsy shows that Natalie Wieser drowned. She also had a skull fracture, but it was not the cause of death. Someone must have thrown her into the water while she was unconscious. Lisa finds a hair tie in her father’s auto repair shop and suspects it belongs to Kathi. Markus Feinig’s mobile phone was last located near Valentin’s workshop. In the cellar of Hubert Lipus’s house, Hannelore and Lisa find the passport of Hubert’s wife, Renate, which he had taken from her. Renate had wanted to leave her husband because of domestic violence, and the next day she disappeared. She had withdrawn a complaint against him. Hubert says he does not know where his wife is. Some time later, Marie is found weak but unharmed, though she cannot remember anything. On a video recording of a carnival party held the day before Marie and Natalie disappeared, police officer Susanne notices that Hannelore left the party at midnight with the two girls. Hannelore admits that the two had been with her the whole time. She had done this to make sure that people would search for the two girls and for Renate at the Lipus house. Natalie’s death was an accident: during an argument, she had hit her head, and Hannelore then threw her into the water because she thought Natalie was already dead. The hair tie Lisa found in the workshop had blood on it, but it was Markus’s blood, not Kathi’s. Kathi is found unharmed in the workshop’s attic. After Markus became violent toward Kathi, she had beaten him to death with a metal pipe. Valentin had then hidden Kathi at his place. He had restored a vintage car for her, intending to let her use the proceeds from its sale to emigrate to New Zealand. Valentin had taken Markus’s body to the scrapyard.